A military judge on Tuesday reduced the potential sentence for an Army private accused of sending reams of classified documents to the WikiLeaks website.

Col. Denise Lind made the ruling during a pretrial hearing at Fort Meade for Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Lind found that Manning suffered illegal pretrial punishment during nine months in a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. She awarded a total of 112 days off any prison sentence Manning gets if he is convicted.

Good for him, but I think he should have gotten the full potential of ten days credit for every day the Judge found that his confinement was “more rigorous than necessary.” She added that the conditions “became excessive in relation to legitimate government interests.” I also think, for whatever it’s worth, that the charge and specification of “Aiding the Enemy” is excessive. While I think he probably knew or should have known that his actions would do damage to the US and aggregate a net positive to the enemy, I do not, and never have thought that he ever planned or plotted to specifically benefit either the Taliban or the Iraqi insurgents. I would not vote to convict on that charge if I were on a panel, and I can’t imagine the Trial Counsel telling me anything that would change that, barring showing us emails between him and Mullah Omar, for example.

This is occuring in the context of a hearing, scheduled for four days (this is day one) in which the defense is arguing that they should be able to introduce evidence of Manning’s motivation, in that they claim he intentionally tried to not damage the US government.

Prosecutors want the judge to bar the defense from producing evidence at Manning’s trial regarding his motive for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of secret war logs and diplomatic cables. They say motive is irrelevant to whether he leaked intelligence, knowing it would be seen by al Qaeda

Manning allegedly told an online confidant-turned-informant that he leaked the material because “I want people to see the truth” and “information should be free.”

Personally, I don’t buy it, but I’m not the Judge so that’s irrelevant. Having said that, in the UCMJ the proper place to discuss motivation is at the Sentencing Phase, should it be necessary, as ‘matters in mitigation or extenuation.’ Motive is not an element of any crime under the UCMJ.

UPDATE: Dissenter at FireDogLake was liveblogging from the court room. Here‘s his/her take on it. 90 minutes for Judge Lind to read the whole ruling, will not be made available to the public–except, one assumes, under FOIA.

I kind of wonder if the judge is expecting him to be found not guilty of the most severe charges. It would be kind of silly for him to be given 7.5 years of credit for something that only carries a penalty of 1 year.

Well, as Denise Lind will be making that decision herself as presiding judge (having granted the defense request that no jury be impanelled for the court martial trial), her ruling today could be “kind of silly” or kind of sadistic (112 days off a life sentence).

If I can locate it later, I”m interested to read how Lind determined that number of days.

@Mnemosyne: That’s possible, I guess. But 7.5 years off would have sent a message that it’s not okay to punish people and mistreat them while waiting for trial, so that would have worked for me regardless of his final sentence.

OT, my dad died 18 years ago today, and I have been thinking about you and your family today as well as my dad.

@Mnemosyne: Well, he elected Judge Alone for his forum (trial type) so Judge Lind will preside by herself and decide his guilt or innocence as well as any sentence he may receive.
Remember that he has already submitted an offer to plead guilty by substitution to several lesser charges in lieu of trial and she has accepted that offer as legally viable. It remains to be seen whether or not he can work out a plea with the Convening Authority.

@Soonergrunt: I feel kind of sick after reading that. I had somehow missed the fact that manning has been betrayed by someone who had promised to protect his secret as a journalist and a church minister.

We’re doing okay at the moment, thanks. I’m back at work and my Illinois brother is still with my mom in Phoenix, taking her around to get some chores done that fell by the wayside while my dad was sick. He’s leaving tomorrow and then her sister arrives on Saturday to stay for three weeks. My California brother and I are trying to figure out who should be next to head out and check up on her once her sister leaves. I think we’re all still in shock to some extent, so ask me in a couple of weeks and I may give you a different answer. :-)

That’s what makes me wonder if the judge’s current thinking is that she will give him a lenient sentence barring some currently unknown game-changing testimony (ie he was in direct contact with someone from al-Qaeda or something like that). If she’s thinking that, based on current facts, he would get a relatively light sentence, then the 112 days credit would make sense, especially if she could sentence him to time served + that.

I haven’t seen any evidence that this judge is the kind of sadistic asshole who would take 112 days off someone’s life sentence.

Manning disseminated classified information without authorization. That’s the extent of the crime (and it is a crime, a pretty serious one at that), though, so I’d be okay with the minimum punishment.

And I won’t begrudge taking time off his sentence for the conditions of his pretrial confinement; there was no excuse for that bullshit, and the people who authorized it should be up on charges themselves IMO. You can enforce the law without being sadistic.

To add a little to soonergrunt’s #27, Adrian Lamo was never a journalist. He is/was a hacker convicted in 2004 of breaking into computer networks at the NYT, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Lamo began to correspond with Bradley Manning in 2009 on online hacker forums. In May 2010 he notified US authorities that Manning had claimed credit for the release of the trove of US diplomatic cables. Beyond his involvement in the Manning affair, Lamo has an unsavory reputation among hackers for alleged work on behalf on government security contractors.

Also, it’s possible you could be referring to Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former spokesman for Wikileaks who later published an account, Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website (2011).

Vowing to destroy Wikileaks and denouncing Assagne, Domscheit-Berg established his own anonymous whistle-blower site, OpenLeaks in 2011, claiming it would be more transparent in its operations. Despite much media ballyhoo, OpenLeaks never released a single leaked document and is no longer in operation. It is widely believed that Domscheit-Berg was a plant, well rewarded for his efforts to discredit Wikileaks.

As a civilian I’ve been following this case somewhat closely, but without the benefit of Sooner’s knowledge of UCMJ procedures (I wade into its website occasionally and quickly grow befuddled).

With that IANAL disclaimer, nothing I’ve read thus far suggests there will such explosive testimony at the court martial. If there were that likelihood, I don’t believe the prosecution would have agreed to Manning’s admission of guilt to lesser charges. And I too have seen no evidence that Denise Lind is any kind of asshole, but the 112 day reduction still seems a little arbitrary until I learn more.

Far more importantly, I’m glad to read you’re doing OK, even for the moment.

@Mnemosyne: Sounds like you are all doing as well as you can be. Very glad about that.

Everybody’s journey is different.

For me with my dad, being daddy’s girl and all, it was devastating when he died, but it actually got even harder for awhile in a different way after that as the reality set in that it wasn’t just that I hadn’t seen him for a few months and would see him again at easter, but that he was truly gone forever.

What I finally came to terms with is that grief is a river that takes its own path. Not your mom’s path, not your brother’s, not your best friend’s, not what G thinks yours should be. Things got easier for me once I accepted that my path would be what it would be. I couldn’t control it, I just had to roll with it.

It sounds like maybe you’re smarter than me and that you already have that figured out.

I don’t understand how this is possible. What kind of commie liberal is this judge? Is she from Code Pink? For months, when I said he was being abused, all the keyboard commandos assured me that military protocol was being followed and that if they didn’t abuse him like this and keep him naked and without his glasses, if he killed himself firebaggers like me would blame Obama.

Many of you internet tough guys continued with this line of invective even when the DOD Inspector General said he was being treated not in accordance with rules. BUT BUT GLENN GREENWALD AND JANE HAMSHER RAWR!

Assholes. Anyone with half a fucking brain could tell he was being treated differently than any other person in custody at Quantico, and the reason for it was he had embarrassed the Brass and the National Security State.

For alleged liberals, there’s not a dimes worth of difference between many of you and Marc Thiessen.

For alleged liberals, there’s not a dimes worth of difference between many of you and Marc Thiessen.

LOL, Che Cole lecturing on who are real liberals again. I can’t think of anyone that continued to question the suicide watch protocols after the IG report. There was really no way to know if Manning was suicidal or not, until an investigation was done, that everyone was for. If your man Greenwald hadn’t lied and exaggerated about so many other details he got wrong from the beginning, like he always does, maybe we’d tend to go with Manning wasn’t suicidal. And being on suicide watch for so long against doctors orders was the abuse the judge was citing.

I can tell you this, real liberals will not be treating Bradley Manning as a hero political prisoner for what he was alleged to have done, if he is convicted. Only left wing whack jobs will do that.

Greenwald claimed Manning was being treated something like Mcqueen in Papillon. 24 hours a day in cell, no media, no reading materials, no outside exercise, as in severe sensory deprivation etc….. just off the top of my head, that ended up not being true. Go read those initial threads on Manning, if you want to see for yourself.

It is little night crawling weasels like you that make this blog comment section all but unreadable anymore, for anything to do with politics. You are some kind of sick in the head that floated by one day and attached itself, rarely adding anything to the discussion other than lame noises of a third rate pendant that are embarrassing to read, they are so lame. To try and win even lamer points, like now.

When this story first broke and the threads on this blog were initially posted, it was, oh noes!! Bradley Manning being tortured with sensory deprivation, mostly from Greenwald and his acolytes spreading the false details far and wide. The only mental picture I could come up with from complete sensory deprivation was Papillon, as a metaphor for what was being claimed by GG for his charge of said sensory deprivation. It was not meant to be a literal comparison you moron.

And Devils Island was later, when Chariere finally escaped, I believe.

@Omnes Omnibus: I didn’t mention Glenn Greenwald. Your buddy General Stuck did. If one makes a claim that someone professed something, one should provide proof of it and/or proof that it’s true/not true.

And as testament to Trolls running this blog. I give you this thread. Impossible to have a thread without a flock of psychos showing up. Still some good folks that comment and FP here, but jesus fucking christ the comment section is a moron sewer.

I will likely drop by an open thread now and then, but who in their right mind wants to participate in comments like here on this thread. I don’t have the money for a psychiatrist.

@General Stuck: In other words, I wish this blog could be a criticism free forum for our love of Obama with no challenges to anything he does, no matter how Bush-like he behaves or how much he takes on the neocon agenda.

I will likely drop by an open thread now and then, but who in their right mind wants to participate in comments like here on this thread.

GBCW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here…I’m holding the door…will you leave already. People hate it when someone says they’re leaving but then hangs around the doorway, mumbling about how they’ll be missed, and how someday everyone will see how they were right all along, etc….

Didn’t say I was leaving, you little monster. I said I’ve had enough. I do face reality, and that reality is that this is your blog now, you and your little helpers, and Cole made you in his little shop of horrors. I will stop by to correct the record, like this time, maybe for other reasons, or maybe not. As is my fancy. For you Timmy

@cathyx: You know, I don’t care. I am sorry I even stepped into this discussion. Have at it. Cole’s comments at 38 had no claims in them; fair enough. None of these comments between these people are part of along running fight where the vast majority of the participants know exactly to what the others are referring. You’ve been around here and a part of these discussions long enough that I am sure you know exactly what everyone meant. And that is why I go annoyed that the discussion was going in the direction of Greeenwald good/Greenwald bad. But do what you want.

Dude, what in the hell do you mean motive isn’t an element of any crime under the UMCJ? Motive is an element of every ordinary felony punishable under the act and of many, if not most, of the purely military crimes.

@Omnes Omnibus: This is what I hate about Obamabots. You will defend anything and everything he does, not matter what. Cole and I both voted for Obama. So we are obviously aren’t against him. But we also don’t just go along and back everything he does, not matter what it is. I think it’s important that one points out the things that one thinks the president is doing that is wrong. He needs to be kept in check, like every politician does. And that is what Greenwald does too. And the president has been doing many things that go against my beliefs. And I think it’s actually a patriotic duty to point those things out.

@cathyx: I accept that Manning was abused. I waited until the IG report to decide that, but, once I had evidence from a source I believed was reliable, I was convinced. I also think that Manning should go through his trial. I don’t think he is a hero; I think is/was a confused young man who did something stupid that has ruined his life. Obama was foolish to have made any kind of comment about his guilt, but I sincerely doubt that a comment in passing will have any effect on Manning’s trial

FWIW I think Brennan is a shitty choice for the CIA; he is too closely aligned with the extraordinary rendition program under Bush for me to be comfortable with him. There is a criticism of Obama. Happy now?

FWIW, your position has been temperate, and solid with perspective. But what we have, in this country, is a fluid situation, requiring all to have some flexibility in thought and behavior. It is not enough, FMP, to wait for the right thing to be said, or done, then join the chorus when that position reaches a level of acceptance from our peers. Many here risk derision and scorn for those who divert from the accepted trope. I think Cole’s true position is dissimilar from your own. What he, iMO, is saying is he is fed up with the MEME. It’s like a drug….intoxicating to be aligned with others. But, the downside is not something we can recover from. It is the current Plague (Ironically, ala the Book of Revelations) which has been visited on our modern Pharisees of religious hyprocrisy, the Tea Party. They are the Zombies who will eat their own to survive. Is that what we want to emulate? Then, don’t be surprised, as they were in November. Be Open and Aware.

Too much, already, do we learn from these false prophets. Is that too hyperbolic? The Chivas Blue was a fine Christmas gift, I must say. The point is, they (Tea Party and all Neocon sub-humans) Are Not Our Teachers.

@NCSteve: NO. Intent, or the reasoned will to commit a specific crime in knowledge of its illegality, is quite frequently an element, unless the crime is one of negligence. Motive, being the reason why the accused may have committed the crime, is not an element of the crime itself under the UCMJ.

If a Soldier rapes and murders a teenage girl, he does not escape justice if he did it just for shits and grins, vs some pathological need to rape and kill. The fact that the Trial Counsel proved that he had intent to rape and kill in the knowledge that those acts were wrong, opportunity to commit those acts, physical evidence that those acts were committed by him, is all that is needed.
Intent, opportunity, and ability.
Motive can be a mitigating or exacerbating factor, which lessens or adds to the punishment the accused may receive, but it is not necessary to prove whether or not the accused committed the crime(s) in question.

As a public service to the BJ community, I think it’s my duty to (very, very reluctantly and with a great sense of sadness) share with all of you that AxelFoley is a known supporter of those who engage, and energetically so, in the act of Necrophilia along with the abomination’s close cousin Zoophilia.

Yes! AxelFoley lends succor and comfort to those who would abuse your loved ones who have gone before, as well as your beloved pets, especially live ones!

I have it on good authority that he lurks at BJ mainly to drool over pictures of Cole’s pets, with a special eye for Tunch!

While I think he probably knew or should have known that his actions would do damage to the US and aggregate a net positive to the enemy,

This is what happens when you have a government that has been telling lies as a foundation for its foreign policies. Not Manning’s fault that the truth hurts us, even when it has no other strategic or tactical value.

[…] John Cole, one of President Obama’s most steadfast supporters (and a former Army soldier), repeatedly condemned the abusive treatment of Manning, and in doing so, continually provoked the scorn of his Obama-supporting readers. Yesterday, after reading news of the military judge’s decision, Cole sarcastically wrote: […]

[…] John Cole, one of President Obama’s most steadfast supporters (and a former Army soldier), repeatedly condemned the abusive treatment of Manning, and in doing so, continually provoked the scorn of his Obama-supporting readers. Yesterday, after reading news of the military judge’s decision, Cole sarcastically wrote: […]

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[…] John Cole, one of President Obama’s most steadfast supporters (and a former Army soldier), repeatedly condemned the abusive treatment of Manning, and in doing so, continually provoked the scorn of his Obama-supporting readers. Yesterday, after reading news of the military judge’s decision, Cole sarcastically wrote: […]

[…] John Cole, one of President Obama’s most steadfast supporters (and a former Army soldier), repeatedly condemned the abusive treatment of Manning, and in doing so, continually provoked the scorn of his Obama-supporting readers. Yesterday, after reading news of the military judge’s decision, Cole sarcastically wrote: […]